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The Colorless Times
The Colorless Times was a site-wide bug where every item quality (except for Unique, Community, Self-Made, Valve, and Strange on Botkiller weapons) was temporarily removed from Item Creation and rendered unusable. This first happened on January 28th, 2016, and happened a second time on February 15th, 2016. The most tragic and noticeable loss was of the Unusual quality, and by extension Unusual effects. This shut down a large amount of creative possibilities, much to the chagrin of taggers. The bug did not affect existing items in the affected qualities; it merely blocked new tags in those qualities from being created until it was fixed. Explanation On February 15th, during the second incidence of the bug, Jesse posted an item set containing a transcript of a Steam chat between him and Dr. Dos regarding this malfunction. The full transcript, copied verbatim from the set, reads as follows: 1:33 PM - Jesse:'' Any reason why stranges are broken on the site, or is it a bug?'' 1:34 PM - DADT Pvt. Twinkletoes:'' that is certainly a bug'' the wiki pages I pulled rarity info from stopped being updated which is why stuff like new collector's items aren't marked as such i'm thinking of just saying fuck it and making all rarities open to everything other than unusual pistols or w/e since i dont think being able to submit strange booties or whatever is a problem 1:38 PM - Jesse: i'd say maybe. just maybe though. The sentences about 'wiki pages' referred to a site backend change made during the The Mobile-Friendly Update, which made it so that items were updated automatically through the TF2 Wiki rather than having to be done manually. It is not known whether this lack of updates caused the bug or was simply coincidental. This was considered to be an important post, as not only did it contain now-rare correspondence from Dos, but it also provided some explanation for the lack of item updates to reflect newly added qualities and Unusual effects. The Return "Thank the lord Satan almighty." ~ Blast, overjoyed at the return of his beloved Hellfire effect The bug was indirectly fixed on March 10th 2016 through an unannounced update by Dr. Dos, in which removed item quality restrictions from the Item Creation system (just as he'd proposed in the Steam transcript).'' This occurrence was first reported by Meta Breakers who made this submission as a demonstration. This change was effectively a way of killing two birds with one stone; eliminating the need for individual items to have their available qualities updated through the TF2 Wiki solved both the bug and the wiki's tardiness. '''So what does that mean?' Almost every quality is available for use with all items that can be submitted. The only exceptions are listed below: * Weapons cannot be Unusual (as TF2B doesn't have icons for them). * Strange qualities are limited to those with an item can actually use: ** Weapons can only use Strange to Hale's Own. ** Weapons with their own ranks, such as the Mantreads or Sapper, can only use their specific set of ranks. ** Cosmetics can only use Ragged to Mannceaux Signature Collection. * Taunts can only use Unique or Valve (Unusual taunts are broken for unknown reasons). Category:History